Here is a great article from Palladium Magazine by one of our acolytes at STM Toronto.
It is well worth your time to read the entire article, link at bottom.
Here are some excerpts:
The relationship between religious belief and the liberal order has always been complex. It has fluctuated between collaboration and strife. The Catholic relationship in particular has often experienced these side-by-side. Catholic emancipation in Britain came in living memory of the brutal war in the French Vendée. Post-war accommodation of American liberalism came shortly after Mexico’s Cristero war, during which an anti-clerical government judicially murdered thousands of its opponents and the Mexican priesthood shrank to nearly a tenth of its former size. U.S. oil interests pursued and gained that same government’s cooperation. Decades later, the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero similarly would be assassinated via the agents of a U.S.-backed regime. Between the Catholic and the liberal projects, the only constant factor has been uncertainty.
This tension has been reflected within Catholic political thought. The popes of the 19th century took a strong stand against the militant and revolutionary liberalism of their day. Those of the 20th century—as well as the ecumenical Second Vatican Council —attempted to seek areas of cooperation and common understanding. But decades of cultural conflicts and deepening reflection on the modern world by Catholic minds has seen the rise of a new, critical, and confrontational approach. Nor does this approach break the continuity of teaching. On the contrary, it is reflected in the teachings of successive popes, and not least in that of the first Supreme Pontiff from the Americas: Pope Francis. The global reshaping of the Catholic Church and the orientation of this teaching points toward an ever more direct and dramatic confrontation between the Catholic and liberal worlds.
The consequences are by no means restricted to practicing believers. The Catholic Church includes nearly 1.3 billion in its ranks, around a seventh of the human population. In those countries where it has long existed, it remains a powerful institutional force. In other regions, especially the global south, it is advancing via population growth and conversion. The signs are already there. There are Africa’s 200 million Catholics, many of whom travel to Europe not just as migrants but also as priests and monastics. Further east, the Vatican continues diplomatic efforts with China on behalf of a growing Catholic populace estimated at 12 million or more. Latin America continues to experience strong population growth. But while the Church’s makeup and centers of influence are fluctuating, they have done so many times. Its intellectual and social influence will ripple far beyond its membership. Such is the nature of an institution which has survived through the rise and fall of multiple civilizations.
The Birth And Death Of Fusionism
Much of the 20th century relationship between the Catholic and liberal worlds has been a product of Europe and the United States. The former is not only the home of the Roman See, but also the region where two world wars shaped Catholic concerns. The latter has been the seat of global liberal power since the close of those wars, and was also the major foe of global communism. Moreover, its large Catholic population became influential across American society, from its labor movement to its conservative intelligentsia. Meanwhile, Christian democratic parties in Europe appeared to harmonize the aims of Christian values and liberal politics.
The Second Vatican council, which ran from 1962 to 1965, was widely understood to have emphasized areas of common ground between Catholic teaching and liberal concerns, such as human dignity (with results considered bridge-building by advocates and betrayal by critics). Yet this period was, in many ways, a high point for those who favored cooperation. The cultural upheavals of the 1960s-70s saw turns toward moral norms which the Church could not abide. As a result, realignments occurred in the following decades along the lines of social issues, benefiting conservative parties. The rise of neoliberal economics also fueled the decline of the organized labor movement in which Catholics had been so present.
With the renewed anti-communism of Thatcher and Reagan, a coalition began to build around social conservatism and free market economics. A number of Catholic intellectuals and publications would contribute to this “fusionist” position, which was most prominent in the English-speaking countries. However, its last hurrah came within years of the 2008 U.S. election. Conservative positions in the culture war on marriage and secularism had been lost. Moreover, its “compassionate” capitalism had prevented neither the economic crisis of 2008-9, nor the stagnation faced by huge segments of the American electorate. With populism reshaping the global political spectrum, the fusionist experiment is widely viewed as a failure. The same has echoed throughout the Western world, with populist movements in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and other countries embracing a Catholic language on cultural and social issues combined with various programs of social support for families.
Papal Teaching And Liberal Man: A Tale Of Two Anthropologies
The question of Catholic political thought is not merely a sociological one—that is, Catholic thought is not reducible to the spectrum of beliefs among those who self-identify with the religion. Rather, it is shaped by the reflections and actions of a hierarchical organization which exercises teaching authority over the broader population of believers. This hierarchy exercises a power called the magisterium, a term which refers to the teaching authority of the Pope and bishops in interpreting the Catholic faith, its sacred tradition, and its application through the course of history. The highest expression of this authority is in the Pope’s role as supreme pastor and teacher of the Church—an ex cathedra dogmatic pronouncement on matters of faith and morals—or in the decrees of ecumenical councils. However, the daily public teaching of the Pope and bishops through encyclicals, letters, homilies, and the like also has a binding authority known as the ordinary magisterium. It is in the magisterium that the highest religious teaching authority is to be found, and it is here where the pattern and the continuity of meditation on liberalism and the modern world has the strongest implications for Catholics.
A survey of papal teaching on the question of liberalism reveals an increasingly sophisticated understanding of our current age. Moreover, it is ever more confrontational toward it, and this has developed through successive popes, confounding the categories of “conservative” and “liberal” Catholicism imposed by current political structures.
To understand this development, it’s important to return to an earlier age of the liberal project. In the early 19th century, liberalism remained a militant, secularist, and often anti-clerical force. The Church of this period had already been rocked by the events of the French revolution, and saw similar forces rising near its center in the guise of Italian nationalism. But beneath these events lay a political doctrine, and it was in this context that the Papal magisterium began to address this doctrine in detail. Pope Gregory XVI released the encyclical Mirari vos in 1832, condemning the notion that religious belief is irrelevant provided that one is moral (indifferentism), the liberties of conscience and of publishing without regard to truth, and the severing of religious and political authority by the separation of church and state, among others. A generation later, Pope Pius IX added his voice in a response to the forces of Risorgimento, which pursued a liberal Italian nation-state and targeted Rome itself. In 1864, he published the encyclical Quanta Cura, which included the well-known Syllabus of Errors. These documents were wider in scope and confronted a liberalism which was developed but also increasingly diverse.
In the modern context, the declarations of Mirari vos seem arbitrary. But it is in Quanta Cura and the Syllabus that the Papal magisterium began to discern and target fundamental differences between itself and the liberal doctrine. Unlike later rivals—Marxism, National Socialism, and the like—liberalism has never had a foundational text or unified doctrine, though certain themes have consistently reoccurred. The documents condemned a variety of propositions found in the literature of the day which were thought to be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.
Most fundamentally, the encyclical and Syllabus targeted the idea that there existed a rational “secular truth” which could ignore the truths and values proclaimed by the Church. They countered this with the stance that human reason and conscience do not exist in an autonomous sphere divorced from the world. Religious claims could be true or false, but they cannot be relegated to the private sphere in favor of a neutral state. Affirming that the Church’s claims were true and bore consequences for social and political life, Quanta Cura and Syllabus defended it from demands of subjugation by secular powers. More particularly, they rejected the claim that either private reason or the public state could get away with disregarding these truths.
To the modern reader, this seems presumptuous, even arrogant. But it bears consideration that modern states and their citizens do not act differently. Both governments and individuals must make decisions, pass judgements, and set goals. In order to do this, one must have some kind of desirable end in mind. This in turn depends on a value system and a view of the world.
While some differences about the nature of reality can co-exist with each other, others cannot. Universities have faced internal battles on the teaching of evolutionary biology, first between scientists and religious objectors, and today between scientists and social constructionists. When governments fund university departments, they participate in this battle over truth. The same holds true for cultural mores. The definitions of marriage and gender are not merely arbitrary points of private opinion. Based on the progressive view, governments have legislated penaltiesagainst certain kinds of speech, schools promote a particular vision of morality and justice, and both public and corporate power fund the advance and popular celebration of these values. Many would not even consider this a real clash of moral worlds. These values are merely those things which all good and respectable people believe—despite being only a few years old. In reality, a certain pattern of belief and behavior has been normalized, and it socially and legally excludes those rival patterns which contradict it.
However, there is a key difference between the old order and the new. In the age of Pope Pius IX, the understanding of truth was explicit and formal. Currently, those with the power to shape the beliefs of society do so freed of any duty to affirm the source of their judgments. Moreover, the lack of any formal institutional approach allows for new factions to quickly arise and overthrow their predecessors. The radicals of the 1960s have become the worried centrists of the 2010s, and the classical liberals have taken to making podcasts rather than mounting barricades. But the arbitrariness of liberalism’s principles and taboos is merely the effect of its structure. Even in 1864, Pius IX sensed that when liberalism unleashed the individual from the spiritual, moral, and communal worlds, the main beneficiaries were the bearers of power:
And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that “the people’s will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right.” But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?
The rise of liberalism as a doctrine cannot be separated from the social mechanism of that rise: a bourgeois class which was increasingly influential, confident, and intent on removing the obstacles to its power. The values of individualism, meritocracy, and social liberation served specific goals. The tie between doctrine and power was not an observation specific to the Church. From a very different perspective, Karl Marx notedthe alignments of French revolutionary factions with class interests: legitimists with the landed gentry, Orleanists with the wealthy merchants, and social democracy as an alliance between the middle classes and the burgeoning urban proletariat. Two forces must be distinguished in this account of liberalism. The first is that of a class promoting a particular ideology. The second is that of the ideological belief system itself. If a particular class maintains its power, then ideologies can well change with the interests of that class. In the 20th century, concerns about socialism led some parts of the business class to see fascism as a lesser evil. Likewise, an ideology can be adopted by various classes sharing similar interests. Marxism has been the tool not only for Western urban workers, but Chinese and Cuban peasantry.
The point of this observation is that the transformation of society by a liberal political order was not only a matter of debates on truth. Social and economic life was in the thralls of the industrial revolution, which brought about both a new technological world and the poverty of mass dislocation. From this strife, liberalism began to confront the rising power of socialism. With members of all classes among its ranks, the Church likewise confronted the crisis.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII released the historic encyclical Rerum Novarum. It is generally known for its rejection of an unbridled market and its affirmation of labor unions as a method to secure social and economic dignity. It also called on employers to subject their economic interests to greater social and religious duties, such as time off on feast days. Written at the end of the 19th century, it promoted a notion of property tied to familial ownership, particularly of land. In the tradition of Aquinas, it affirmed that this property was subject to the good of both spiritual duty and the commonwealth, while the commonwealth likewise must respect the rights of the family according to natural law. It also called on states to recognize that while the rights of all must be respected, the duty of justice required a focus on those segments which made up the bulk of the commonwealth but lacked the private resources of wealthier classes.
While much can and has been written on the differences between the liberal and Catholic ideas of property, it is what underlies this difference which is of deeper concern. In Rerum Novarum, a distinctive ordering of life exists. Economic power is subject to the good of the commonwealth, which is safeguarded by the state. The political power itself is subject in faith and morals to the spiritual authority of the Church, which is (as we saw in the earlier encyclicals) the guardian of those truths which allow humans to realize their highest good. Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX had condemned a doctrine where religious authority was subject to political authority, with the latter warning against power divorced from truth. Pope Leo XIII was confronting the economic consequences of such a divorce.
Nevertheless, there is an optimism in Rerum Novarum which is hard to miss. At the time of its writing, a number of private associations had arisen for the benefit of workers. In addition to the growing power of organized labor, even employers and wealthy benefactors had, to an extent, embraced a culture of public responsibility. Charities, insurance associations, and workingman’s associations had begun to create a support structure to alleviate the excesses of the industrial revolution. The encyclical praises these and ends on a hopeful note that such developments will resolve the crisis of labor. In this sense, Rerum Novarum can perhaps be viewed as the beginning of a period where the Church began to see opportunities for cooperation, taking the best of liberal achievements and turning them toward Christian values. The coming decades would see two world wars eliminate most of the remaining Christian monarchies in Europe and the rise of ideologies hostile to Catholicism. Its post-war engagement was with a triumphant and vigorous liberal international order.
The Second Vatican Council is often viewed as the Church’s attempt to engage the modern world from its highest levels. While this is an over-simplification, elements within the council did desire rapprochement and an end to the battles of the past century. It is also true that a renewed witness and evangelization was front and center in the minds of the council fathers, and especially of the popes who oversaw it: John XXIII and Paul VI. The results of this council were of monumental significance. On the one hand, the council provided a renewed framework for addressing a host of theological and social concerns. On the other, it created conflict between “traditionalist” and “conciliar” factions within the Church. The former believed that a number of the council documents had sacrificed clarity for the sake of diplomacy, or worse, capitulation. The latter often adopted a similar reading of the council documents, but embraced and sought to accelerate what they considered to be the “spirit of Vatican II.” Liturgical reforms to the rites of the Mass became a battleground. Some sought to protect the ancient liturgy against what they saw as a new, stunted ritual, while others implemented changes far beyond anything which the council had sanctioned. Many of the splits and factions from this period last to the modern day.
For the moment, we’ll refrain from going down the rabbit-hole of post-conciliar politics. Rather, our interest is in the council’s approach to defining and contrasting the Church’s doctrine with those promoted by the world around it. The council fathers discerned that it was ever more vital for the Church to defend and champion its view of the human person as an integral being: material, social, political, religious. This commitment was not merely intellectual, but was born in the fire of war. It underpinned many anti-Hitlerist Catholic writings, such as those of the White Rose dissidents and Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster. Likewise, Catholics underwent severe persecution along with Eastern Orthodox Christians under Soviet rule, particularly those of the eastern-rite Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Among the documents most positive toward the post-war political order was the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, entitled Gaudium et Spes. In this context, the council fathers began with a reaffirmation of the human person, its nature, its dignity, and its telos in the world. It begins in the beginning, reasserting the Christian understanding of man as bearing the divine image, as a being created for communion with others, and as a creature who finds himself in a fractured and darkened state:
Although he was made by God in a state of holiness, from the very onset of his history man abused his liberty, at the urging of the Evil One. Man set himself against God and sought to attain his goal apart from God. Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, but their senseless minds were darkened and they served the creature rather than the Creator…Therefore man is split within himself. As a result, all of human life, whether individual or collective, shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness.
While this doctrine might seem all-too-familiar, its implications for the Church’s role in the world are enormous. As a result of this belief, it can never accept a vision of man that separates him from his telos. The notion that human society can exist as something distinct from human nature is a contradiction in terms. Thus, it declares that modern minds have used freedom “perversely as a license for doing whatever pleases them, even if it is evil.” As it develops, the document squarely targets the moral construct of the sovereign and autonomous individual:
Coming down to practical and particularly urgent consequences, this council lays stress on reverence for man; everyone must consider his every neighbor without exception as another self, taking into account first of all His life and the means necessary to living it with dignity, so as not to imitate the rich man who had no concern for the poor man Lazarus…As God did not create man for life in isolation, but for the formation of social unity, so also “it has pleased God to make men holy and save them not merely as individuals, without bond or link between them, but by making them into a single people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness [Lumen Gentium].”
With this in mind, Gaudium et Spes condemns the division of the world into religious and irreligious spheres:
[They are] wide of the mark who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations, and who imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from the religious life. This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age. Long since, the Prophets of the Old Testament fought vehemently against this scandal and even more so did Jesus Christ Himself in the New Testament threaten it with grave punishments. Therefore, let there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and religious life on the other.
Based on this foundation, the remainder of the document—and the other documents of the council—expand on the implications of such an anthropology for social, political, economic, and religious order.
The avenues of thought opened by the council have lasted to the modern day. The optimism, arguably, has not. The final arc of development takes place after the council and in the context of a Western culture increasingly hostile to religious life and values. The reason for this was simple: like Christianity, the liberal view of man in fact possessed a telos, a goal which it pursued for human societies. While the Christian anthropology called on humans to embrace God and neighbor, the liberal one oriented them towards liberation of the individual. The former required people and societies to embrace both religious commandments and social obligations. The latter increasingly saw these as coercive, even in the form of cultural norms rather than legal ones.
The liberal telos advanced across the political spectrum, eroding both institutions and values shaped by traditional social norms on the on hand and the economic left on the other. Those parties associated with the left abandoned the causes of labor and embraced those of social progressivism. Meanwhile, the right’s social traditionalism increasingly became merely a tool of coalition-building. Its real contributions to government and society became economic neoliberalism and internationalist neoconservatism. Decade by decade, more of the perceived shackles of social morality and economic solidarity were torn off. Yet the prediction of Pope Pius IX still held: behind the ideology of the free individual lay the reality of unbounded power.
Nevertheless, the Church now possessed both well over a century of meditation on liberalism as a doctrine. Moreover, it had increasingly developed an anthropology which perceived the fundamental divide between the Catholic and the liberal telos. Armed with these tools, it became possible for the magisterium to perceive a particular mode of being into which humanity was increasingly socialized. Moreover, it could explain why this mode of being subjected the human person to both spiritual and social violence, subverting the telos both of communion with God and with neighbor. This brings us to the encyclicals of three Popes: John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.
The full article is found here:
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